Beyond individual stories: women have moved mountains

Among all the social movements of the past century, the struggle for
women’s rights and gender equality has been the most transformative in terms of
the deep tectonic shifts it has created in the social terrain, yet skepticism about
the value of funding women's rights work persists

Women’s movements, and especially feminist women’s movements,
through both their scholars and activists, have spearheaded some of the most fundamental
shifts in our way of understanding our
societies and the nature of social injustice.
They have excavated the breadth and depth of gender discrimination –
till then either invisible or considered “normal” - in virtually every society
in the world, especially gender-based violence in all its forms. Till late in
the last century, for instance, violence against women in its multiple forms –
whether wife-beating, rape, dowry-burning or female genital cutting – was
calmly accepted, viewed either as private misfortunes, or as feudal cultural
practices, rather than as evidence of the unacceptable oppression and denial of
the human rights of one half of the human race. Today, every society is forced to address these, even if some
misogynistic regimes choose to justify them through cultural relativist arguments.

Feminists have raised the voice and visibility of women’s perspectives
on issues as disparate as the environment, the economy, and peace. Until DAWN’s pathbreaking analysis in 1987, for instance, there was little
awareness that economic policies impacted men and women differently, even among
the poorest households, or that Third World feminists perspectives on economic
equality were radically
different from that of feminists from the
North. And there would be no Human
Development Index – much less a Gender-Related
Development Index – without the voice of women
demanding visibility for the gender discrimination that prevails in virtually
every state and society. Feminist
activism pushed forward formal equality through relentless research and
advocacy for constitutional, legal and policy reform – few of us realize that
until the Eighties, gender-disaggregated data was not available in most
national statistical systems. And they
challenged and transformed international and national norm structures (like the
Universal Declaration on Human Rights) that were hitherto androcentric – it was
only in the Nineties, for example, that feminists worldwide mobilized to
challenged the dominant framing of human rights, including the definition of rights
violations like torture, and compelled the recognition of the unique range of
atrocities faced by women, in both war and peace, with the rallying cry “women’s
rights are human rights”. And the notion of universal adult franchise
would not exist but for feminist mobilizations that began very early in the
last century…

Women’s organizations have mobilized and empowered millions of women
in their households and communities, and built strong movements – by the end of
the last century, it was virtually impossible to find a corner of the world
that did not have a women’s movement of some kind, and in most, strong
grassroots women’s movements with an impressive “mass base”. Many of these movements moved across borders
to become powerful transnational movements – of informal sector women workers,
or poor grassroots women, or indigenous women, or women living in conflict
areas and working for peace.

Feminists created new concepts and discourse that transformed even the
academic mainstream – today, we use the terms “gender” or “gender analysis”
with little recognition of the fact that it was feminists who appropriated
these terms from other disciplines, recast them, and provided us with new tools
of social analysis that did not exist before. By doing so, they have
permanently altered the prism through which we view social reality and our
ideas of social justice. This is why
there is universal
outrage when a Malala
Yousufzai is shot for trying to go to school, or a
young para-medical student is gang
raped on a Delhi bus. It is because our entire sense of justice
and fairness has been raised up to a new standard.

The collective impact of women’s movements and organizations has thus
cut across theory and practice, public policy and programmes, and our social
institutions and ways of thinking, from the local to the global level. No other
movement has had such sweeping and deep impact on our lives, even if some of us
were dragged, kicking and screaming, into its vortex. And if you still don’t believe it, just look at the intensifying
and often violent
backlash against women’s rights and gender
equality, and the reversal of past gains, almost everywhere – from the assault
on women’s reproductive rights in the United States, to the banning of girls
schools by the Taliban.

Is it not then astounding that despite this incredible impact,
feminists are held in almost universal contempt, and women’s rights organizations and the movements they work with
have had to contend with declining
financial support, a lack of widespread public
acknowledgement, and growing challenges
to their credibility? Worse, many components of the very strategies that enabled this
impact have been dismantled, isolated, and implemented piecemeal, divested of
their transformative politics - like micro-credit, quotas for women in
politics, and legal
aid for women in distress – because these are
considered to show faster, concrete results, though they do not necessarily
address the deeper roots of gender discrimination and may even aggravate
existing gender biases. How has this
happened? Why are feminists in general,
and women’s rights organizations in particular, on the back foot, struggling to
prove that they still matter – that their work is far from done, and that while
gender equality is everyone’s responsibility, it is they who must still lead
the struggle?

Part of the problem, perhaps, is that the achievements of women’s
movements have never really been analyzed and projected in this way - at an
aggregate level, and over the
long-term. This is not for lack of
concrete evidence. Donors, for one,
have increasingly demanded the tracking of “concrete results”, but they have
tended to ask for evidence of impact at an individual organization or
project level. But despite having
decades of impact data in their archives, few donors have seen the need to
analyze this information to create a larger historic picture of what their
grantees have achieved collectively, especially in terms of the specific
manifestations of gender discrimination they have prioritized and funded over
the years. Both private foundations and
bilateral and multilateral donors, for instance, have funded work on women’s
economic empowerment, health and reproductive health and rights, political
participation, and violence against women, for close to half a century. But until recently, it was hard to find a
comprehensive analysis of what kinds of transformations occurred as a result of
these investments, or strong
evidence-based analysis that it is women’s
rights organizations and movements that have made the difference. On the flip side, women’s organizations and
movements themselves have not had the resources, capacity, space or mechanisms
to analyze their achievements
collectively – they have had far too many more pressing priorities competing
for their attention and increasingly meager human and financial resources. The
consequences of this data deficit are many.

There is widespread, if somewhat unfounded, skepticism about the value of funding more transformative women’s rights work –
such as the consciousness-raising, mobilizing, and movement-building approaches
of an earlier time - because they are too “slow” and do not show quick evidence
of impact. Indeed, there is little
support today for such core strategies as funding cycles have shrunk to one- or
at the most two-year cycles. There is a
shift towards short-term or instrumental strategies – like micro-credit, and
the “investing in women and girls” approach (such as Nike’s “Girl Effect”
formula) - that are considered to show faster, easy-to-measure results, though
these do not necessarily address the deeper roots of gender discrimination and
may even aggravate existing gender biases.

Critics and skeptics are quick to point to women’s organizations’ and
movements’ inability to “make a convincing case” for the greater strategic
impact of their longer-term and deeper approaches to transforming gender power
structures. But interestingly, these
actors are equally unable to make a case that these deeper strategies DON’T
work better. They simply keep feeding
us with the superficial data from their quick-fix solutions, which are usually
about large numbers but tell us little about how gender relations within
relationships, households, communities, or societies have changed, or for how
long. And they tell us nothing at all
about how power in the intimate realm of consciousness – factors like
self-image, confidence, or the sense of
being subjects of rights with the agency to claim and assert those rights – has
changed because women now get loans, sit in the local council, or seek
redress. Here, they become as anecdotal
as the very organizations and movements whose evidence they dismiss as… “just individual women’s stories”.

It is against this backdrop that AWID decided to undertake an
experiment, catalyzed by a historic
funding opportunity afforded to gender equality and women’s empowerment work
worldwide: the launch, in 2007, of the path-breaking MDG3 Fund by the Government
of the Netherlands. For the first time
in history, a pot of 82 million Euros was made available to 45 organizations –
the majority of whom were women’s rights organizations – to undertake a diverse
range of programs addressing gender-based violence, women’s economic
empowerment and property and inheritance rights, and political
participation. The Fund did not dictate
strategy or approach, but selected organizations with impressive track records,
or the capacity to re-route money to large number of smaller, grassroots-based
organizations working with the most marginalized women.

AWID seized the chance to work with this network of organizations
(which included itself) to conduct an aggregate analysis of the impact of their
MDG3 Fund-supported work – to generate a “big picture” of the changes wrought
that would be greater than the sum of its parts. In the second part of this article, to be published on February
25th, we shall see how this aggregate analysis lays to rest most of the
questions about both the "measurability" as well as the value of
funding women's rights work that is neither short term nor based on silver
bullets....

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